Playwright Carson Kreitzer wins Dowling fellowship

Carson Kreitzer, a playwright of ferocious intellect and arresting language who takes on challenging themes, will get some quiet time to work in Ireland next year. She has won the 2014 Joe Dowling Annaghmakerrig Fellowship, an award that entitles her to two weeks of creative time at the estate of theater founder Tyrone Guthrie in Annaghmakerrig. She will join artists from around the world at the retreat, where she plans to start work on a new play.

“I'm pretty giddy about this,” Kreitzer said from New York, where she is working on a new work. “It's just such an amazing opportunity, and a place I've always wanted to go.”

The award by the region’s leading theater may also help loft Kreitzer into another realm of theater in the Twin Cities, where she lives but where her plays are only now beginning to get the kind of big productions they have enjoyed elsewhere.

“Behind the Eye,” her play about World War II combat photographer Lee Miller, who also inspired many surrealists, will open at Park Square in May.

“The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Kreitzer’s 2004 play about the father of the atomic bomb, won a string of awards and has been lauded wherever it has been produced. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote this of the Windy City staging: "So much brilliance, ambivalence, ego, history, myth, science, moral argument, emotional heat, poetry and sheer dazzling theatricality are compressed into the mere two hours it takes for Carson Kreitzer's ‘The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer to detonate on the stage…that by the time it is all over, you might easily feel you've been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation."

In Cincinnati, the production was simply “superb,” according to the Enquirer.

Kreitzer also has written for work that has been produced in the Guthrie’s summer and actor training programs, including “Be Here Now…,” a take-off on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” Her play, “Lasso of Truth,” about the man who created Wonder Woman, recently was announced as the National New Play Network’s 40th rolling world premiere. It will get productions at Marin Theatre Company, Synchronicity in Atlanta, and Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City.

A member of the playwright-led Workhaus Collective and a board member of the Playwrights’ Center, Kreitzer earned degrees from Yale and the University of Texas at Austin.

The Guthrie has commissioned her to write a new play.

“Carson is a playwright whose work combines great imagination with meticulous craft,” Dowling said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing the results of her fellowship.”